The present disclosure relates to electronic messaging and user interfaces. In particular, the present disclosure relates to synchronizing data across multiple browser tabs or windows.
While users once operated their computing devices with a single browser showing a single webpage, the use of web browsers, the Internet and other types of electronic messaging has changed dramatically. For example, many ordinary users often have several different tabs showing web pages open at a given time. For power users, the number of tabs open at a given time can be greater than 20. Furthermore, no longer is the web browser solely used for retrieving information from the Internet and displaying static web pages. Now the web browser is used as an interface to manage e-mail, social networking, blogging, posting photos, watching videos, editing documents, and any number of additional activities. Therefore, it is important for users to be able to manage these different types of messaging and switch between them.
With the browser being used for so many different activities, the speed at which the browser can retrieve and present information from a server is impaired. Additionally, many users have installed extensions or plug-ins to their web browser and this also impacts how quickly the browser can retrieve and display information. When information is not shown and displayed quickly enough this degrades the user experience and in the more problematic cases causes users to reload or re-fetch information. This causes unnecessary network traffic and additional load on web servers.
As noted above, users no longer have only a single browser tab or window with only one page being viewed at a time. In some cases, the information being delivered to multiple different tabs or windows is the same. For companies that deliver significant amounts of web content, the more requests that are sent to the servers, the more response bandwidth and processing power are required to service these requests. In some cases, this means that they have installed additional web servers to provide adequate bandwidth and processing power to respond to the requests for information.